


our final, faulted hope

by chagrin



Series: (interlude) to the apocalypse [2]
Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Gen, fun times with team animus, happy belated deathday luce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-11
Updated: 2013-10-11
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:19:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chagrin/pseuds/chagrin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She lies not within our sight. (Death and its reversal.)</p><p>They were disillusioned pawns who knew discontent, who saw more than the conceptual good and evil of their world would lead them to believe. Sometimes, the night goes on forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	our final, faulted hope

_The final journey commences._

Somehow, Lucy Stillman’s already resigned herself to oblivion.

It was a severe kind of existentialism, severing fissures in ribs to split open halos, sanctimony in the cautionary tale of abstract irony. The silence coaxes on desperation, catches onto oxygen and drowns in the dizzy vertigo of timestamp decibels. In lieu of some warming noonday, a solidifying night, evening hurtling into a dusk they no longer have no name for. Unease settles in their bones. ( _October 10._ The date bothers her to the point of unnerving, but that in itself is no reason to put off what she’s sworn herself to, and she pointedly dismisses it as paranoia.) 

They are scabbed over in excruciating apprehension (clotting the capillaries, drenching the limbs), but they complicity trust each other, and so they are unafraid together, only blistered with qualms. Four-cubed was a rounded amiability, and it wasn’t a mutually exclusive issue to fixate belief in their immortality. They are all more than the sum of their parts. By that point, it was a slow and smoky mantra to survive. If one of them fell, the rest would inevitably follow suit (a lesser degree of upended pseudo-fate).

Echoes in glass, resonating underfoot; the fractured undercurrent of warbling footfalls in a temple of blown static, of metallic suns. At the mottled heart of the Coliseum, hazy lights burst into fluorescent rust spiraled around the dais, at the steps leading to their absolution. The Apple of Eden hung suspended on its pedestal, gone sour with potential, with the substantiality of a congealing ultimatum in rippling gold.

On the verge of her end, she knew.

The fizzling air, stagnant with pestilence, was the precursor to harbinger demise, to a fevered velocity of cathedrals severed from history, contritely holy. Fatalism skipping akimbo, itching at her veins — it was unmistakable that Lucy would find her resolution there. Grief, amputated. A sudden resuscitation of irrational alarm at the altar, like commitment issues were the norm after twenty-four years of indoctrination. There’s only shock in lieu of horror, depthless and utterly surreal. And she turns to face Desmond, Rebecca and Shaun bleached incorporeal in the shadow of her silhouette.

And she turns.

She _turns_.

.

Seventeen days at the bottom of the ocean.

The pulse between seconds, shredded to collapsible detritus.

In the bleak soliloquy of imploring desolation, there are only extremes. Fingers splayed out. Consternation synapsed in a black hole, dense enough to induce an event horizon in the lungs. Eyes snapped wide. The afterimage of hypocrisy burned into the retinas. Throat closed up with asphyxiation.

Lucy is a deer-in-headlights, diaphanous and cracked-open through flesh and plasma, bleeding profusely, belatedly. Her heart skitters nebulously, a still-beating, quivering, ropy mess of flickering dissolution.

Tomorrow, she will plead her case to them in self-immolation; extricate the desecrated loneliness of perennial decades at the tip of her tongue. She will caustically bare her soul in earnest, flesh out her melting dogma and the semantics of martyred subterfuge in the wake of the dawn.

Lucy will always find some way to save them all, because it’s what she’s always done.

**_I’m sorry._ **

.

But it’s over.

Too late for fail-safe chances, or what might’ve been, in that deflating interval of straining deafness, breathing beneath strangled ghosts and death-row emptiness, superfluity to sentimentality and everything in between. 

_Everything they hope to become, everything they hold dear._

_It’s already gone._

.

The first thing Shaun Hastings registers is an unrepentantly raw, keening scream fracturing the silence.

It’s serrated and reeling in anguish (a writhing, drawn-out cry of violently unadulterated pain rising, rising). It crawls out of someone’s throat into sharp acuity, and it elapses into a hoarse, thin wailing.

_“Oh, god. Luce, Lucy, **sweetheart** , Luce, please, please, please, you’ve gotta’ stay with us, **no** —“ _

The calling, the calling is a tangled shuddering of muffled sobs and imploring pleas, on and on, unceasing.

He can’t differentiate between any of them, for a splintered, drowning moment. He blindly grasps at his throat, vision spinning into cruel relief from an inertia rush of motion-drunkenness, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. 

Eventually, Shaun focuses past the distended sobbing and stares torpidly at the red enshrining the threshold, pooling beneath Lucy’s crumpled form.

Death, thickly smeared over her abdomen, lilting rivulets into her jacket-vest ensemble, converging at the point where she bleeds mercurially. Lucy is pallidly ashen in contrast, wholly incongruous to the way the veins should’ve skipped under her complexion, the lulling spontaneity of pitchy reassurance. That was why it mattered to check, to make certain of truth indelible to the tongue. He’d stumbled down beside Rebecca, who continued to weep inconsolably, a tableau of misery. 

“I don’t w-want to hear it. _Don’t you tell me she’s dead._ She’s — _she’s_ —they’ll make it in time.” She shrivels into herself, a blotchy, scraping movement of red-rimmed, stinging eyes and compact denial. For Rebecca, it’ll always be the five stages of grief. Carving out emotions temporarily satiate the hollowing absence, because she cares _so damn much_ and every life matters, has _always_ mattered. Her avoidance philosophy, the lethargy of bereavement; Shaun knows better than to convince her otherwise.

And _still_.

Checking Lucy’s pulse was a futilely wretched effort, a decanted rain-check that he’d known wouldn’t be there (known from the brittle stillness of her limbs, biting satire wrought to flesh and warped across her features). Shaun tries all the same, at the skin of her wrist, at the juncture between collarbone and neck, fingers at her temple, searching out a telltale pulse. Anything. _Anything._

She isn’t moving.

The entire world seems to be built upon that tiny contradiction.

He doesn’t understand.

There’s no sense of religion or reconciled faith, then, in the condensation of decay. Desmond is incapacitated beside her. He hasn’t stirred once, fallen mutely catatonic. In retrospect, it’s a saving grace. He never would’ve wanted to see Lucy like that, at the end — shattered in a form of ritualistic sacrifice, viscera staining the altar sanguine.

The Apple is discarded, a pernicious, luridly sentient god lolling away from Desmond’s reach by the breadth of fingertips. Neither Rebecca nor Shaun can bear to glance at it, much less retrieve the **_godawful_** thing. The heaviness of their burden percolates.

Loss, indomitably, conquered all.

And they cope, yet again, with being the ones left behind _(their own veritable Rapture, ad infinitum)_.


End file.
